I'm baaack: C34 Stagea

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

7 hours ago, AngryRB said:

I said a "gt30 size??" Still to the average punter im sure they wouldnt  be disappointed with a gt3076 on an RB30 or 25 engine or feel much difference on the road

Meh, GTX3071R Gen 2, will make more power than that dinosaur turbo and transient would be amazing.

GT3xxx turbos are as ancient as me. You'll silly to go walk into a shop and buy a GT3076 when when a GTX3071R Gen 2 will destroy it.

[mosquitocoils]

Thanks for the turbo advice guys. I'll come back to that in a bit. 

In the meantime I spent a couple of hours getting the audio setup a bit better. The first step was running power and RCA cables for a 2ch amp to power my sub (ironically this sub is out of my R33 from 8 years ago!). 

It was a pretty straight forward process - run the power cable from the battery, through the firewall and down under the kick panels next to the doors all the way to the boot. RCA cable always goes on the opposite side to avoid noise. 

I picked up this no-brand 2ch 200w amp for free from a local Subaru group and it does a great job of pushing my sub. Bass just sounds so good in the back of the Stagea, it was made for a big sound system haha. But my little amp+sub combo will do the trick for me.



Once that was done I wanted to tackle some rattles. It has aftermarker speakers all around but 2 or 3 of them rattled badly on bass hits even at low volume. After taking the doors off and checking them out I realised I just needed something behind the speakers as they were largely sitting on metal, save for a small plastic bracket that didn't cover much. Some leftover Autobarn sound deadener from my forester boot install came in handy for this, I basically made a gasket for each speaker as you can see from the pic. Screwed everything back in and I can go muuuch louder before rattles start, in fact so loud it's painful - so I will be fine now haha. Loving it. 

 

Edited October 16, 2019 by mosquitocoils

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

If you're really keen, remove all that plastic sheeting in the door and replace it with waterproof foam, generally those thin sheets you use as a yoga mat will do. Then send it's mum with sound deadening on the doors.

I did that with my old R33, painted on sound deadening, then stuck on e dead (poor man's dynamatt) and went to town and sealed the door with foam sheets. 

Ran Focal 165K splits and it sounded porno, these days cbf with audio ?

[mosquitocoils]

On 10/17/2019 at 12:17 PM, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

If you're really keen, remove all that plastic sheeting in the door and replace it with waterproof foam, generally those thin sheets you use as a yoga mat will do.

Hahaha that's actually amazing. I pretty much cbf with it either but some of those rattles were super annoying and turned out to be easy fixes... so win/win haha

[mosquitocoils]

The next thing I did was 'convert' it to RWD just for shits and giggs... completely pointless but hey, it was free haha.

This really just involved hopping under the car, undoing the 4 bolts holding the front driveshaft/propshaft to the front diff, then pulling the shaft out of the transmission as it's not really held in by anything. Took about half an hour. 

It hasn't really made a huge difference to anything... I reaaally have to push it to chirp the rear tyres and even then the auto transmission really makes it difficult to build any power on takeoff. All the more reason the manual swap...

Edited October 19, 2019 by mosquitocoils

[GTSBoy]

ATESSA transfer case will NOT appreciate you dropping the front driveshaft. Have you disabled it electrically too? You will blow it up if you haven't.

[mosquitocoils]

4 hours ago, GTSBoy said:

ATESSA transfer case will NOT appreciate you dropping the front driveshaft. Have you disabled it electrically too? You will blow it up if you haven't.

Oops, I didn't mention that in the post but yes I also pulled the fuse as per everyone's instructions. 

[mosquitocoils]

I went out the night I made it RWD to test it out... drove for a couple of km with no problems, then suddenly she died and wouldn't start again. Without knowing exactly why, I was repeatedly cranking to try and start it... and in the process drained the battery and killed the starter motor... what an eventful night.

I'm pretty sure that outer gear is supposed to have teeth...

While I was waiting for my 'new' starter motor to arrive from a wreck I figured out my issue was an injector seal had worked its way loose (probably from when I first got the car and replaced a couple of dodgy injectors) and was just dumping fuel into one of the cylinders which the RB didn't like very much. Replaced that, checked there were no leaks from the injectors/rail and we were all good! 

Behold the import in its natural habitat - 

Edited October 20, 2019 by mosquitocoils

[GTSBoy]

6 hours ago, mosquitocoils said:

Oops, I didn't mention that in the post but yes I also pulled the fuse as per everyone's instructions.

Is not pulling the fuse valid for R32 era stuff? For R33 era stuff, are you not supposed to use the wire connection under the dash to relieve the pre-load pressure in the ATESSA transfer case? Driving with the pre-load left there with no driveshaft is what I was initially talking about when I suggested #notagoodidea

[mosquitocoils]

1 hour ago, GTSBoy said:

Is not pulling the fuse valid for R32 era stuff? For R33 era stuff, are you not supposed to use the wire connection under the dash to relieve the pre-load pressure in the ATESSA transfer case? Driving with the pre-load left there with no driveshaft is what I was initially talking about when I suggested #notagoodidea

Everything I've found kind of mentions the other way being more important - people asking if only pulling the fuse is enough, or if the shaft needs to be removed as well... to which everyone says "definitely also remove the shaft". Then people argue over if the fuse is also needed or not.

The wire under the dash is I believe to bleed the ATTESSA system out... but apparently just driving the car will bleed the pressure as well... according to many people on this forum.

I'm always happy to be proven wrong though and if I need to also bleed the system to prevent damage I'll do it. Wouldn't be hard at all. 

 

On 1/17/2010 at 10:05 AM, KiwiRS4T said:

Pulling the fuse is not enough on the Stagea you have to remove the front drivshaft. The Attessa is different from that on the R32 where pulling the fuse was all you had to do.

 

 

Edited October 20, 2019 by mosquitocoils

[mosquitocoils]

I came across some 3 inch stainless steel 90 degree bends as offcuts for $10 each from an exhaust shop nearby... figured I could make an intake from one for a bigger intake sound, and it definitely worked. 

The intake swooosh is much, MUCH louder now and as I'm running no BOV (due to the forward facing plenum) that fluttering now turns almost into high-pitched pigeon dosing at 10+ psi ? It's so wanky but I giggle every time hahaha

[mosquitocoils]

Following GTSBoys advice I looked more into bleeding the ATTESSA system and have now (put the fuse back in...then) disconnected the plug under the dash, tapped the brake pedal 5 times and then got the 4WD light flashing after hearing the pump whirring away. 

So now the system should theoretically have all the pressure bled out which means the clutch packs can't potentially be frying while driving. Hooray! 

For the record the plug under my dash was a plain black plug with one wire going in/out, not a green plug like in most guides. Maybe just an early/S1 stagea thing.

[GTSBoy]

Good man.

[mosquitocoils]

So I've been looking into the whole upgrade path a little more and I've decided to do this in two big phases... I'm not the kind of person to amass $20k worth of parts over 5-10 years to fit all at once. I'm an incremental kind of person. So I'm going budget build for now with the eventual aim to manual swap, standalone ECU, e85 etc.

So I picked up a cheap turbo setup. It's all ebay spec stuff but it should do the job for a while. 

- GT3582 spec turbo
- High mount manifold, doesn't seem to have any cracks
- 38mm EWG with screamer
- Dump pipe to suit the high mount

I'm pretty happy considering what I paid and if it lasts a little while I'll be happy enough, and if it doesn't at least I didn't waste much. 

I've decided to stick with the auto + AWD  for now and get a piggyback ECU and just see what I can achieve that way. In the meantime I'll keep saving for the manual conversion but that's about $2200-$2800ish so a fair way off.

I've also found out that 740cc injectors could be enough to get me 300-350ish kw and generally the Nismo or DW 740cc can be found for around $300 and fit the stock sidefeed rail which looks like a pretty good alternative to a $1000-$1500 top feed conversion. 

So really my "to-buy" list as of now consists of:

- Fuel pump
- 740cc injectors
- FPR (?)
- Piggyback ecu
- Wideband sensor

Edited October 29, 2019 by mosquitocoils

[KiwiRS4T]

I was making 320AWKW with the stock FPR so no need to change it unless you run into problems.

[mosquitocoils]

Wow that's good to hear. I read that you need about 3 bar base pressure for it to work with 740cc injectors which I figured was close to standard spec, but I figured an adjustable FPR would let me fine-tune it if I needed to. I guess I can leave it and only get one if I need to change the pressure.

Which injectors were you running for that?

[KiwiRS4T]

Deatschworks 550 - but if I were doing it today I would get Xspurt 1550s (not ID or Bosch CNG injectors). I believe you can get modern injectors to fit on the stock rail but I am not sure exactly which ones.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Stock FPR can be used if you don't remove the stock fuel dampener and don't run massive pumps.

Once you start running twin habibbro 460, etc. the stock reg can't regulate fuel pressure properly and your fuel pressure shoots through the roof (I've seen this before when a fuel pressure gauge was installed inline).

I generally always install FPRs on any cars running decent fuel pump or pumps, these days they're cheap enough to purchase.

[mosquitocoils]

I haven't had much time to focus on the stagea much lately, but have tried to fix up a couple of things...

For one I put the front driveshaft back in... the more I thought about it the more I thought having a RWD auto just for the gimmick was kinda silly and it wasn't any more fun overall... plus the risk of not disconnecting everything properly etc... just makes sense to keep in AWD!

[mosquitocoils]

Another thing that's been making progress difficult is my battery situation. I'm having a hard time getting it to start sometimes, especially at night once I've been driving for a while with my headlights on. 

So far I've replaced the alternator and starter motor, it's a new battery (replaced the week I got the car) but I wonder if it's too small as it's a 340cca ... and I've never heard of the brand Mixtech before... 

The battery is usually sitting around 12.5-12.6v when left overnight which isn't terrible. When I first got the right tensioner bolt in it was only charging at around 13.8v so a quick adjustment tighter and I got it up to where it is now at 14.1-14.2v but I can't get it to charge any more (14.4v is the goal, isn't it?).

In the process of checking all my cables I found the earth from the exhaust manifold to chassis was basically non-existant... it had burnt away at the manifold end and was dangling in the engine bay... so I've now run a new temporary earth cable there. I've also since added another decent gauge ground cable between battery -ve and the chassis for peace of mind.



With that done the car has started mostly ok (maybe just coincidental), however there is still a voltage drop of 0.3-0.5v when using the headlights. Combine that and voltage drop that happens when under load (every time I accelerate hard the voltage seems to drop to 13ish and maybe 12ish sometimes) and quite often the volt gauge in the turbo timer starts flashing due to 'low battery' haha... 

If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears, because the next step is going to be a battery relocation to the boot and a big ass battery to go there as well! Which is a decent chunk of change I could be spending on go fast bits
 

Edited November 22, 2019 by mosquitocoils